Famous West Virginians.....

http://jeff560.tripod.com/famousy.html




Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager (1923- ) became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental Bell X-1. He also became the first person to fly more than twice the speed of sound, flying the Bell X-1A on December 12, 1953. Yeager was born at Myra in Lincoln County and later moved to West Hamlin. He graduated from Hamlin High School in 1941. In a 1991 interview, Yeager said:

I was born in Myra, West Virginia, which was actually just a post office on Mud River, very near Hamlin, West Virginia. My first recollection was when we moved to Hamlin when I was about four or five years old. And that's where I spent my life until I was eighteen years old. It was a rural town, population of about six hundred. It's in the middle of the hills. Primarily agriculture, timber, coal mines, and some natural gas; my father was a natural gas driller. I attended grade school and I did very well in the first grade, skipped second grade and went to the third grade. And by the time I got to the fifth grade, I spent two years there. It got kind of tough. And then, grade school was just nine months out of the year that I enjoyed either running the hills or fishing, and things like that. In high school, things got a little more serious as far as my education was concerned. And also there were sports -- football and basketball -- I played both. And I also played trombone in the high school band and chased gals, so I was a pretty busy kid. The subjects that I liked very much in school were mathematics, algebra and typing. I could type 60 words a minute easily. Anything that took hand-eye coordination I had a good time at it. History and English literature,

Pearl Buck (1892-1973), American novelist, born in Hillsboro, W. Va. The daughter of American missionaries, she lived in China until 1933. Of her more than 85 books, many sympathetically portray China and its people. Her simple, direct style and concern for the fundamental values of human life were derived from her study of the Chinese novel. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938. Among her works are The Good Earth (1931), a dramatic tale of China in the 1920s that received a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932 and has continued to be very popular, and Dragon Seed (1942). Her last works include The Kennedy Women (1970) and China As I See It (1970). [Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia]

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), an educator who was appointed organizer and principal of what is now Tuskegee University in 1881. Washington made the institution into a major center for industrial and agricultural training and in the process became a well-known public speaker. He was born on a plantation in Franklin Co., Va., the son of a slave. Following the Civil War, his family moved to Malden, W. Va., where he worked in a salt furnace and in coal mines. In his autobiography Up From Slavery, Washington wrote:

At that time salt-mining was the great industry in that part of West Virginia, and the little town of Malden was right in the midst of the salt-furnaces. My stepfather had already secured a job at a salt-furnace and he had also secured a little cabin for us to live in. Our new house was no better than the one we had left on the old plantation in Virginia. In fact, in one respect it was worse. Notwithstanding the poor condition of our plantation cabin, we were at all times sure of pure air. Our new home was in the midst of a cluster of cabins crowded closely together, and as there were no sanitary regulations, the filth about the cabins was often intolerable. Some of our neighbours were coloured people, and some were the poorest and most ignorant and degraded white people. It was a motley mixture. Drinking, gambling, quarrels, fights, and shockingly immoral practices were frequent. All who lived in the little town were in one way or another connected with the salt business. Though I was a mere child, my stepfather put me and my brother at work in one of the furnaces. Often I began work as early as four o'clock in the morning.

After working in the salt furnace and coal mines, Washington was hired to work as a servant for Mrs. Viola Ruffner, the wife of Gen. Lewis Ruffner, the owner of the salt furnace and coal mines.

John D. Rockefeller, IV (1937- ) is a United States Senator from West Virginia and a former Governor of West Virginia. Rockefeller was born in New York, N. Y. After college, Rockefeller worked for the Peace Corps in Washington, where he served as the operations director for their largest overseas program in the Philippines. He continued his public service in 1964-65 as a VISTA volunteer. He was then elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1966, and to the office of West Virginia Secretary of State in 1968. Following his term as Secretary of State, he served as President of West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1973 to 1976. The people of West Virginia then elected him to be Governor in 1976 and re-elected him in 1980. In 1984, he was elected to the United States Senate, and re-elected in 1990, 1996 and 2002. [Information from http://rockefeller.senate.gov/.]

John Forbes Nash Jr. (1928- ), a mathematician who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his landmark work, first begun in the 1950s, on the mathematics of game theory. He shared the Prize with Hungarian-American economist John C. Harsanyi and German mathematician Reinhard Selten. Nash began to experience what he called "mental disturbances" in 1959 and was involuntarily hospitalized for a time. A 1998 biography of Nash, A Beautiful Mind, written by Sylvia Nasar, describes Nash as a mathematical genius at Princeton and MIT who essentially lost 30 years of his life to paranoid schizophrenia and who re-emerged into public glory once the disease was in remission to receive the Nobel prize for a brilliant doctoral dissertation he had done in 1950. Nash blamed his collapse on the mental effort of resolving contradictions in quantum theory. A movie with the same title was released in 2002. Nash was born in Bluefield and grew up there. He attended Wade Elementary School, Whitethorn Elementary School, Fairview Junior High School, and Beaver High School, from which he graduated in 1945. While a senior in high school he took supplementary math courses at Bluefield College. Nash’s maternal grandfather, Dr. James Everett Martin, was an early settler in Bluefield, and served as its sixth mayor in 1896-97.

See W. Va covers the spectrum...

WV is a beautiful place full of good people. I lived there for a little while in my early twenties. Excellent hunting too.

PkrBum wrote:WV is a beautiful place full of good people. I lived there for a little while in my early twenties. Excellent hunting too.

It would be a far better place if it hadn't been run by Democrats ...the state is a clear study in what liberals create when left unchallenged.

TEOTWAWKI wrote:http://jeff560.tripod.com/famousy.html




Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager (1923- ) became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental Bell X-1. He also became the first person to fly more than twice the speed of sound, flying the Bell X-1A on December 12, 1953. Yeager was born at Myra in Lincoln County and later moved to West Hamlin. He graduated from Hamlin High School in 1941. In a 1991 interview, Yeager said:

   I was born in Myra, West Virginia, which was actually just a post office on Mud River, very near Hamlin, West Virginia. My first recollection was when we moved to Hamlin when I was about four or five years old. And that's where I spent my life until I was eighteen years old. It was a rural town, population of about six hundred. It's in the middle of the hills. Primarily agriculture, timber, coal mines, and some natural gas; my father was a natural gas driller. I attended grade school and I did very well in the first grade, skipped second grade and went to the third grade. And by the time I got to the fifth grade, I spent two years there. It got kind of tough. And then, grade school was just nine months out of the year that I enjoyed either running the hills or fishing, and things like that. In high school, things got a little more serious as far as my education was concerned. And also there were sports -- football and basketball -- I played both. And I also played trombone in the high school band and chased gals, so I was a pretty busy kid. The subjects that I liked very much in school were mathematics, algebra and typing. I could type 60 words a minute easily. Anything that took hand-eye coordination I had a good time at it. History and English literature,

And he was Steve Yeager ( catcher for the Dodgers) uncle.

He had two brothers, Roy and Hal, Jr., and two sisters, Doris Ann (accidentally killed at 2 by 6-year old Roy playing with a shotgun)[

No question a family from West Virgina......he had the damn best vision and found a vocation where that physical asset helped him achieve elite status.